The University of Alabama at Birmingham's Department of Philosophy will present a keynote address from George Lucas—Professor Emeritus, U.S. Naval Academy and Naval Postgraduate School and Alfred North Whitehead Visiting Professor of Philosophy, Southern Illinois University-Carbondale—in conjunction with the Concerned Philosophers for Peace Annual Meeting organized by Professor David Chan. This talk is open to all and conference registration is not required.

Professor Lucas is “Distinguished Chair in Ethics” Emeritus at the U.S. Naval Academy, and Professor Emeritus of Ethics and Public Policy at the Graduate School of Public Policy at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. He has taught at Georgetown University, Notre Dame University, Emory University, Case-Western Reserve University, Randolph-Macon College, the French Military Academy (Saint-Cyr), and the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium, and most recently served as the Vice Admiral James B. Stockdale Professor of Ethics at the U.S. Naval War College (Newport RI). His main areas of interest are applied moral philosophy and military ethics, and he has written on such topics as: irregular and hybrid warfare, cyber conflict, military and professional ethics, and ethical challenges of emerging military technologies.

For this talk, Lucas will explore insights from his most recent book, Law, Ethics and Emergent Military Technologies (Routledge, 2023). According to Lucas, much attention in the technology sector has been almost exclusively focused on the changing nature of warfare. He shares that little of this discussion is directed explicitly toward the goals of attaining a stable peace, reducing the level or incidence of armed conflict and its attendant collateral harm, or working to counter some of the root causes of conflict. In this talk, he will address some of the more hopeful uses of emergent technologies, including military technologies, to promote stability, reduce human suffering, and counter the current prevailing tendencies toward conflict and warfare.

This keynote is co-sponsored by the departments of Anthropology and Political Science and Public Administration, as well as the Institute for Human Rights.